In January of 2003, I put up a post pointing out Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Top ten web design mistakes’. Though his advice is generally aimed more at commercial sites than personal sites, many of the concepts will cary over from one to the other, so I used the list to evaluate my own site and see how I was doing.
That March, a visitor by the name of ‘Deakster‘ [Deakster’s site may come up with a ‘403 forbidden’ error if you attempt clicking on his link, as I think he may be denying any visitors referred by my website.] came by the page and left a mildly snide comment about Nielsen and his company. Not in itself a big deal, but when I visited the URL left by Deakster, I found that his own site was coded in such a way as to require Internet Explorer, and would not load for me using Safari on my Mac or Mozilla on my PC. I mentioned this in a reply comment, that was that, and I didn’t think any more of it.
Last week, almost a year since he left his original comment, Deakster came back. This time, apparently incensed by my reply to his first comment, he took it upon himself to critique myself and one of my sites (specifically, what little is left at djwudi.com) in two comments left back-to-back.
Needless to say, I was a little amused by this (not just that he attempted to take me to task, and that he did so quite poorly, but mostly that he came back nearly a full year after his last and only previous comment to my site), and responded in turn. Again, Deakster wasn’t thrilled, started to leave more comments, but soon requested that I remove all of his comments from the page, declaring that he “no longer wanted to be associated with the site.”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually at my computer when his request first came through, so twenty minutes later he made the same request again.
It wasn’t long after that that I did get the message, however, and while I didn’t remove the comment placeholders from the page (I saw no reason to remove my comments, and as they were replies to his, I didn’t like the idea of out-and-out deleting his comments and ‘orphaning’ mine). I did, however, remove the text of his comments, indicating that I had done so at his request.
Apparently that wasn’t good enough.
I now have 75 bogus trackback pings on that post, courtesy of my new friend, with messages such as “Michael is a first class prick and should keep his mouth shut,” “Take on a haxor an end up with an app that autopost shit to yer crap site,” “Your blog aint sexy and neither is your bald spot,” “Why are yanks such fools — cause they are all like Michael,” and his final ultimatum, “Had enough Michael — i will leave it if you delete everything I want deleting and I mean everything.”
Why, I do believe I’m being harassed, ladies and gentlemen.
All of Deakster’s comments over the past few days and every one of the bogus TrackBack pings has come from IP address 81.152.149.121. Unfortunately, while I could ban that IP address from commenting, I don’t believe that there is currently a way to ban TrackBack pings by IP.
So what now?
Obviously, I certainly could “delete-everything-i-want-deleting-and-i-mean-everything” all of Deakster’s comments (and TrackBack pings) easily enough, but something tells me that he’ll likely not be satisfied until I also expunge my reply (which contains quotes from his comments) also, which I’m in no great hurry to do (hey, I had fun responding to his attacks…). Besides, giving in to script kiddies (a category I wouldn’t have put Deakster in until I got the TrackBack ping flood) isn’t my idea of a good time. ;)